Smartkem Secures UK Patent for MicroLED Display Manufacturing Method

Smartkem, a company developing transistor technology for electronics, has announced the issuance of a UK patent for a new MicroLED display manufacturing method, expanding its intellectual property portfolio. The patent covers a process for patterning an organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) backplane on a source wafer and selectively removing MicroLEDs from that wafer.
According to Smartkem Chairman and CEO Ian Jenks, the company holds 140 granted patents across 17 patent families and 40 codified trade secrets. The new patent describes a technique for MicroLED display manufacturing that improves efficiency, reduces material waste, and lowers production costs.
The patented method involves preparing a MicroLED wafer, applying an adhesion layer to expose selected MicroLEDs, and depositing an OTFT backplane onto the adhesion layer, aligned to connect with the exposed LEDs. The assembly is then removed from the source wafer and transferred to a display substrate. Unlike traditional monolithic MicroLED display manufacturing, where LEDs and transistors are grown on a single substrate, this approach allows selective transfer of only the required LEDs, enabling reuse of the source wafer multiple times. This results in lower display production costs compared to methods using the entire source wafer in a single process.
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